Tim Farron: The Tories still won’t give London enough homes

Embargoed to 0001 Monday April 8.
File photo dated 12/07/12 of an aerial view of houses on residential streets in Muswell Hill, north London, as total household wealth in the UK has soared past the £7 trillion mark for the first time, research has found. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Monday April 8, 2013. Net wealth, which includes the value of residential buildings and financial assets held by households, minus outstanding debts, has been estimated at £7.05 trillion for the end of 2012. Lloyds TSB Private Banking, which carried out the research, said that despite the current tough state of the economy, there has been a £2.71 trillion increase over the past decade, equating to £86,000 per household. Lloyds said that a rise in financial assets has boosted the increase in household wealth over the last decade, contributing £1.7 trillion to the overall rise. Financial assets include bank and building society deposits, government bonds, shares in listed companies, life assurance and pensions. Meanwhile, housing wealth has increased by £1 trillion over the past decade as the value of property has risen by more than the increase in mortgage debt. See PA story MONEY Wealth. Photo credit should read: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire

Being an optimistic person, I hoped that with yesterday’s Budget we would see a real chance for London, and the UK more widely, to build the thousands of homes we need. I hoped that we would see a real set of policies that would help thousands of Londoners get on the housing ladder. Sadly, as much as the Liberal Democrats pushed for this, the Conservatives pushed back.

The Chancellor, to be fair to him, has set out the detail on how the first garden city since the 1920s will be delivered. Let’s ignore for the moment that the original ambition of Ebbsfleet has dropped from 20,000 homes to 15,000 and celebrate that, at least nationally, our Coalition partners have acknowledged that a housing crisis will take more than a few populist policies to fix. But 15,000 homes isn’t the 300,000 homes we actually need.

So forgive me for being overly cautious about the much-trumpeted extension of Help to Buy. That’s good news for the 74,000 people who can grab the chance for help with their deposits. But with house prices rising, Help to Buy threatens to stoke the London property market and could pull the chance of home ownership away from thousands.

The experience of Lib-Dems in coalition has all too often been that the Tories talk about building but focus on short-term political interests.

The questions surrounding how we tackle this crisis run deep. What kind of homes should we build? For whom? At what cost? In London the Mayor has a responsibility to ensure that he tackles this mess on all fronts, rather than just attend to his pet loves.

Take empty homes. In government, the Lib-Dems have given councils the power to charge what is essentially an empty homes tax and launched an empty homes fund which has helped to turn thousands of vacant properties into new homes. The Mayor has a whopping £15.6 million to spend on this problem through his own programme — that’s £13,000 to renovate each empty property. But in 2012-13, he managed to restore just eight properties. The year before that, he managed 10.

You have to ask yourself: what is Boris Johnson doing? And why isn’t he doing it better?

In an ill-judged speech a few months ago, Boris angered many when he implied that some people are too stupid to get on in life. He said: “I don’t believe economic equality is possible; indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses and so on, that it is a valuable spur to economic activity.” So greed is good and greed will build London — if you’re lucky.

I’m not surprised that instead of a big push for affordable homes, up to 70 per cent of new-build homes in central London are sold to overseas purchasers as investment holdings. The Chancellor’s announcement that anyone buying a home worth more than £500,000 through a corporate envelope will have to pay 15 per cent stamp duty is a step forward. But it’s going to take more to convince me that Boris and his Conservative colleagues will take the next step — let alone go the extra mile — needed to deliver the truly affordable homes that the young, overcrowded and priced-out in London need.